The Informatics Shared Resource (ISR) serves as a biomedical research informatics resource for KCC's basic, clinical, and translational investigators. This support includes infrastructure! provisioning, software development or acquisition, and consultative collaboration. ISR services are available directly to peer reviewed funded cancer investigators, or indirectly to other cancer center core facilities, thereby providing services to all program members. The ISR also provides informatics support for the clinical research activities of the Jefferson Kimmel Cancer Center Network of community hospitals. More specifically, the ISR supports cancer center research by developing and/or deploying: 1) Clinical trials applications to give clinical researchers the tools to manage clinical trials data, including mandated reporting. 2) Biospecimen repository applications to help tissue bank staff manage specimen accessioning and distribution, and provide investigators with an ordering mechanism and information characterizing specimens available for research. 3) Data warehousing and mining applications to provide cancer researchers with a research data mart that integrates clinical, biospecimen, cancer registry, clinical trials, and experimental data for cohort identification and hypothesis generation. 4) Infrastructure and applications for other KCC shared resources to facilitate access to their services. The ISR thus provides KCC investigators with ready access to integrated comprehensive information on clinical trials, cancer patients, and research specimens, as well as providing a single portal for requesting equipment and services from KCC shared resources. In all its activities, the ISR recognizes interoperability as crucial to the sharing of research data and resources to promote efficient cancer research, and utilizes standards articulated by the NCI and the biomedical informatics community. Software applications are hosted on servers with networked storage located at a commercial data center contracted by the University, providing professional data center security and disaster recovery services. The ISR employs best practices with regard to data privacy and security complying with the Common Rule, HIPAA, and state regulations.